Bragging Up the Bailout

Even for Washington, the chutzpah is off the charts. Following the Senate vote for the Big Bailout, Senators have been parading in front of the TV cameras, praising themselves and each other for their fine job Wednesday night of protecting the American financial system. Coming from some of the Democrats whose policies helped create this crisis, this show puts me in mind of a man who sets you up to be shot in an armed robbery, and then prides himself on bringing you a bandage and handing you back your empty wallet.

As Majority Leader Harry Reid bragged it up, “We sent a message to America, all Americans, that we will not let this economy fail.” Reid lauded the Senators for having “worked together” (or at least voting 74 to 25) to protect “those little side streets” as well as the “mean streets” all across America.

For illumination on the earlier roles in this farce of Senators such as Chris Dodd, Barack Obama & cohorts, check out this post from one of my Pajamas colleagues, Roger Kimball — and if you haven’t already seen the video linked at the end, it provides some clarifying moments. The Wall Street Journal also offers a handy crib sheet of who said what  just a few years ago to defend Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and to shut down critics who were trying to save the financial system back when there was more of it to save. You can match up the names with who is now peacocking in D.C. as having saved us all.

Granted, by now Washington had to do something to keep the credit markets from seizing up like a car engine out of oil. Granted, also, it is not in the nature of politicians to make genuine apologies for horrendous mistakes. Their preference, to borrow the Clinton phrase, is to move on. But in this case — 451-page $700 billion bailout bill in hand — it would have been nice to hear the Democrats spend less time praising themselves as saviors of the little guy, and more time apologizing for the wreck and the Brobdingnagian tab.

Meanwhile, lest in the excitment of all these bailout billions, Washington somehow forgets… the threats to this country don’t stop with the home-made money mess. There is still Iran with its pet Hezbollah terrorists and its nuclear bomb program; the Saudis with their wahhabi habit; an increasingly sinister and aggressive Russia; and Syria; and North Korea; and Venezuela, and Hamas, Al Qaeda, etc.

What’s really crazy, though far less conspicuous than the credit debacle, is that American foreign policy too often ends up providing, in effect, subsidies and on occasion (for instance, such unnatural disasters as state-induced famine in nuclear North Korea) bailouts for some of the same crowd listed just above. This tends to be advertised as aid, or diplomatic carrots, or development programs, or projects for climate modification … whatever … often channeled through the world’s leading anti-American clubhouse, the financial black box known as the United Nations, for which Congress OKs billions of U.S. tax dollars every year.

This setup is quite bad enough already — akin in some ways to subprime lending, or worse; inviting market-warping frameworks throughout the developing world, and in some cases funneling support to some of America’s worst enemies. Barack Obama would like to turn such practices into an even bigger global entitlement program, bankrolled by an automatic and greatly increased flow of American tax dollars — much of which would be administered by a UN that makes subprime mortgage lending look like a model of financial integrity. Some thoughts on this in my column this week for Forbes online: The Other Bailout.

If the Senators who previously championed subprime lending cannot now bring themselves to apologize for the current financial crisis, they might at least have the grace to exercise better oversight of the billions America keeps pouring into the UN. Rescuing the country from some of the mistakes now piling up on that front could end up taking a lot more than just money.